


Jut One of Those Days

by hisboywriter



Category: Young Avengers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 04:22:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hisboywriter/pseuds/hisboywriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Billy has a long day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jut One of Those Days

**-X-**

With greater age, came greater responsibility.

 

That was a life lesson Billy learned early into being the oldest of three siblings.

One responsibility in particular appealed to your overall behavior—that is, curbing it until you had weaned off those childish outbreaks that either got you what you wanted or, if nothing else, made you feel a hell of a lot better. And oh, how Billy yearned to feel a hell of a lot better right about now.

A tempest of a tantrum brewed inside him as he, for the third time, shoved his youngest brother’s medical insurance card into the pharmacist’s lax palm. Paired with her glazed eyes, she was the picture of utter indifference to his plight.

“I was just on the phone with his doctor,” he repeated, his words rolling out of him like they weighed much more than they should. “She said their computer system sent his prescription over already.”

The pharmacist made sound of ‘hm’ as she typed rapidly with one hand.

Billy glanced at his phone. Time couldn’t grind to a halt for him, could it? He had a measly fifteen minutes to pick Jacob up from a friend’s house, drop off a payment on his father’s behalf, and pick up dinner on the way home (since he was the one already out).

He licked his lips and bore his sight into the back of the computer, as though he could will it to de-stupid itself. “This isn’t the first time we’ve used this pharmacy,” he added, hoping it would aid in the process.

By the way the lady resumed tapping, he figured it didn’t.

“Did the primary insurance holder change plans recently?” she asked his card.

Billy resisted the urge to drum his fingers on the counter or tap his foot. He could feel the accusatory glares from customers trapped in the queue behind him. It wasn’t his fault though, not in the slightest. Just because he was the oldest and Tommy was off doing who knew what and Teddy was studying for a big test and his father was sick in bed and his mother being the busy woman she always was, didn’t mean the hiccups in his birth-given responsibilities were born from his negligence.

Right?

He looked at his phone again.  Fourteen minutes. “No,” he answered, “and I really need his prescription and I’m  _not_  paying over a hundred dollars for it. The insurance is  _supposed_  to cover it.”

At last, her eyes lifted, but not at Billy. She rested them on the phone beside her computer and plucked it with her free hand. “Maybe the insurance company can tell us if your plans changed.”

The tantrum almost erupted then. Billy held strong and inhaled deeply, occupying himself by studying the items he intended to buy while at the pharmacy, and  _not_  think about the start of a prick that could become an aggravating itch in his back, the kind he couldn’t reach.

Before him laid a bottle of allergy medicine (for Isaac), fever reliever for his father, and a few protein bars he knew Teddy liked. Maybe he should have gotten some ibuprofen for himself; this lady was making him need it.

He must have reread the ingredients in each product five times before he heard the most wonderful ‘oh, I see’ from the pharmacist—the kind that promised him some good fortune.

“Your plans didn’t change,” the pharmacist began (duh), “but they were delayed in sending you a new card, which has a different number here.”

She demonstrated it on the card too fast for Billy to notice. “Just a quick change in the system here and, ah, there we are. It comes out to twenty dollar even.”

Billy rejoiced in his head, doing cartwheels and a jig that would otherwise embarrass him in public. “Yes, great,” he exhaled and ushered the items toward her. “I’d like to add these with it please.”

She paused, finally looked at him with her unthawed stare. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all, “you’re going to have to pay for those at the front. Our system back here is having technical difficulties with the scanner.”

Billy whimpered.

**-x-**

“Jacob, get out of the car.”

“No.”

Billy sighed, counted to five, and mustered up the best face that relayed his frustration, which amounted to little when he was the idiot dawdling outside the passenger side door, the same idiot who left the keys in the car that his brother now deemed his fort.

“Jacob,” he said levelly, pouring the worst of his negativity into the name, “get out of the car  _now_.”

Jacob sagged deeper into the seat and fiddled with the car keys. “I want to stay inside. You do what you need to do.”

Billy sighed again and braced himself against the top lip of the shut door, desperate to release some of the burden that was just dragging his own weight around and wondering what he had gotten himself into by getting a driver’s license.

“You know why you can’t stay inside,” he started. “Mom says I have to keep an eye on you at all times—“

“—unless you want a pedophile to snatch him up,” Jacob finished.

“Yes, so, come out now.”

“The car is locked. I have a cell phone. I’m not going to be kidnapped in the ten minutes you’re gone,” Jacob said, proving just how unreasonable he could be in the worst of times.

Damn those pre-teen years. Billy hoped he hadn’t been as troublesome and scrubbed the exhaustion from his eyes. He considered an alternative route of approach.

“Jacob, why do you  _want_  to stay inside?” he asked.

Jacob dipped his chin down and held tighter to the keys.

Well, it was something. Billy calculated what he had to do. The insurance payment—that couldn’t be the root of Jacob’s behavior. Maybe the Greek restaurant they’d get dinner from one block down held the key—

“Oh,” Billy said, eyes widening with understanding. “Is this about the owner’s daughter? The one from your school?”

In response, Jacob snorted.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Jacob, that was like six months ago!”

Jacob bolted up as much as someone could in a seat, his stare equivalent to a pair of daggers pointing accusingly at Billy. “She did it on purpose!”

“You’re just upset because you like her,” Billy blurted out. It was a low blow, but he often found that the frayed edges of his patience revealed themselves easiest when it concerned his brothers.

The damage was done though. Trust flayed, Jacob shot him the dirtiest look yet and made a dramatic display of slouching back into the seat.

“I’m not coming out,” he muttered. “I’m old enough to do what I want.”

Terrible two’s were a myth. Tantrums didn’t have a limit when it came to the middle child, of that Billy was certain, even as his own temper fit threatened to show itself. Maybe that terrible truth alone gave grounds for the tingle in his back to blossom into a full-blown itch and he was so close, oh so close, to commence an hour long rant about how being ‘old enough’ to do anything was considerably overrated and, quite honestly, detrimental to both the physical and mental condition.

But instead, Billy bumped his head against the window, and only as he felt the dull pain of having just done that, he wondered how conspicuous he looked. Surely he looked no better than the rumored pedophile trying to coax a brat out of the car?

“Jacob,” he began again, staring through the thick glass, patience waning. “I swear if you don’t get out right now, not only will I find a way to use my magic without anyone seeing to get you out, but I will also be more than willing to tell a certain little girl about your age who helps her father at the restaurant what you wrote about her i— _Ow_!”

Jacob hopped out of the car with a grumble, seemingly too aware that he had just popped the door open right into Billy’s face.

**-x-**

Of course the line to drop off the insurance payment was thirty miles long—felt that way, anyway—thanks to an elderly man with a scalp more mottled than a mold-infested bathroom and with a soul just as mottled. Billy was sure he was making up complaints by the thirteenth minute of them standing in the same spot.

The irony wasn’t lost on him either. He, who had just recently been the cause of a long line earlier on, was now doomed to rot in one himself as penance, made all the more punishing my Jacob’s badgering, At least, Billy dropped off the payment and picked up dinner without a hitch, blessing the small, good fortune he’d been needing.

It wasn’t until they were halfway back home that Billy forgot the spanakopita.

So, when Billy finally trundled in after Jacob (who made a beeline to his own room) into their home, and found the couch calling to him, he nearly lost all nerve and submitted to its coaxing.

A cough echoed from down the hallway though and duties triumphed over temptation. Still, he gave the couch a pining look before hobbling past it.

Door locked and bags set down, he fished out a small box of food for his father and the medicine before creeping into his parent’s room, using his foot against the door to announce his arrival. Depositing the food and medicine was easy. Not so much in communicating with his father, who struggled to speak over the frog in his throat or not jolt up into a sneezing fit every few words.

“Just rest,” he told his father. “Let me know if you need anything, alright, Dad?”

His father did, croaking for him just as he stepped two feet outside the door.

Billy peeked back in. “Yeah?”

A sniff. “No, it’s okay. I just,” a sneeze, “ugh, sorry. Just that Isaac needs help,” a half-sneeze, “project…”

He tried to say more and a sneeze-cough attack ensured it wouldn’t be heard. Billy understood well enough and winced, the impending paroxysm of annoyance giving way to sheer exhaustion. Reluctantly, he flicked his eyes down the hall to the door that marked Isaac’s room and scratched his back absentmindedly. There was still the dishes he promised his mother he’d finish, and he had to email his teacher, but wasn’t there something else he had to—

His father coughed up a lung, jerking him out of his cluttered thinking.

Billy looked back into the room and forced a smile. “Yeah, sure. No problem.”

**-x-**

As life would have it, there had been a lot of problems.

Billy dove face first into the couch at last, groaning into a cushioned seat as the day’s burden crashed into his psyche and limbs. A few times he wiggled his shoulder blades and thrice aimed to scratch the cursed spot, only to find it would escape to a less accessible area for his nails.

He stopped bothering altogether, not even allowing himself the satisfaction of shouting into the armrest or flailing his arms to unleash the day’s encumbrance. No, mimicking a corpse was much better. Far less energy required.

He tried to indulge in the respite in lieu of reliving his earlier failure with Isaac and that blasted homework assignment—an assignment Billy was flabbergasted to learn he knew little about and resorted to the internet. Pair it with the incessant interruptions by his father’s raspy call, and it was only a matter time before Isaac kicked Billy out of his room, insisting he was better off on his own.

Ego bruised, Billy decided he was better off on his own too. Just him and the couch.

But, of course, it was one of those days, and the sweet silence he had just adjusted to shattered with an eruption of: “ _… **there’s no one like Macavity, he’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of** …”_

“Ugh.” Billy let the sound die into the couch as the ringtone rang out (personalized for Tommy) on full volume. “Shut up,” he told it.

“You going to get that?”

The intrusion had Billy whipping his head up, and he instantly regretted it when he heard something crack. Grimacing, he spotted Teddy looming over the couch, backpack in tow and with a slanted smile. In one hand he held Billy’s phone, revealing Tommy’s name flashing on the front.

Billy wondered how busted his brain was if he hadn’t heard the door, but decided dropping his head back into his sanctuary was a better alternative.

“Mmph,” he said in complaint and greeting all in one, a small part of him wanting to smile at the return of his boyfriend. A bigger, nastier part of him just wanted to pass out and bleach the day from his mind.

“Guess not,” Teddy said and the music stopped.

There was some bustle and then Billy felt hands on his legs, lifting them. Teddy’s weight settled at the end of the couch and welcoming, large hands lowered his legs back down, onto his boyfriend’s lap.

“Mm.”

“One of those days?” Teddy asked.

Billy tilted his face so he could breathe better and speak. “I was tempted to use my powers,” he answered.

“That bad, huh?” The comment preceded a light squeeze to his calves. “Looks like I made it in time to bring you back to life.”

That action earned itself a low moan. “Got a ‘phoenix down’ on you?”

Teddy chuckled, a simple sound that buried into Billy’s weariness and pulled out a smile. “Fresh out. Might have some hi-potion though. How long was your day exactly if you’re needing one?”

“Long,” Billy said, and expended what little energy remained into detailing the delights of his day, ending it with a groan when Teddy’s hands reached up to massage the back of his thighs.

“I’m sorry,” Teddy said, “if I wasn’t at the study session, I could have helped.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Billy grunted. “Just happens when you’re the oldest.  _And_ I’ve had this awful itch in my back I haven’t been able to get rid of.”

“Well,” Teddy began around a soft laugh, hand rising as the green pigment overtook it and his fingers broadened into claws, “I think I can help with that.”

Billy tucked his hands under his cheek, settling right in, smiling like a fool. “I’ll see it when I believe it,” he taunted.

Then, glorious release rained down on him as Teddy’s claw dipped and zigzagged across his back, hunting down each stubborn itch where the itch has made its home. Billy’s smile faded, face overcome with peace, and not just born from being rid of the tingles in his back. The pressure was impeccable and Billy allowed himself a moment to marvel at how precise Teddy was, how gentle he could be even when sporting two massive paws with speared fingers.

“You’re amazing,” Billy purred.

“You tend to say that, but,” Teddy said, voice low as though mindful that Billy was teetering between this world and dreamland, “I think you’re the amazing one. Amazing big brother.”

Billy opened his eyes, unsure when they had drifted shut. “I’m not so sure my brothers would agree, not including Tommy,” he said, managing a half eye-roll.

“And,” Teddy went on, rolling his own eyes, “that’s what you have me for, to remind you that you are a great brother and patch you up for future brotherly fights.”

Two nails crept up Billy’s neck, lacing through the labyrinth of hair follicles as they pampered the mage’s scalp.

“Oh,” Billy sighed. “I think I’m about to purr like a walrus here, Teddy.”

Teddy laughed, and Billy felt it reverberate from the tips of the claws down into his toes. “Then you’re the best looking walrus I’ve ever seen. The only one worth kissing.”

Billy smiled and nudged his back, signaling the ministrations to stop so he could roll onto his back. “That so?” he asked and pressed the soles of his feet into Teddy’s palms.

“Very,” Teddy said.

Claws still out, they scraped along the top of Billy’s feet, eliciting a burst of tickle-induced laughing, and traced nonsensical patterns up his legs. They circled each knee and Billy practically morphed into goop right there, back sagging deeper into the couch, eyes half-lidded.

“You’re spoiling me,” Billy said on a relaxed exhale. “Didn’t you have a long day too with studying?”

“I like doing this,” Teddy assured, making his digits walk up Billy’s thighs like spiders. “I like that I can help you unwind.”

Billy moaned his assent and shuddered when the spiked points tickled his hips through the fabric of his jeans. “Mm. I like spoiling you too.”

“How so?” Teddy’s voice rose into a tease, one finger caressing Billy’s exposed jaw.

Unable to resist, even in his fatigued state, Billy pumped up the volume on his smile until it was a full-fledged grin. He kept it up as he held Teddy’s thick wrist still and kissed each digit. “I did get you some of those bars you like, but that’s not the best part.”

Teddy maneuvered his hand, palm cupping Billy’s cheek. “What’s the best part?”

“Come here and find out,” Billy said, eyebrows lifting.

When Teddy replied with a knowing smile, Billy shifted his legs enough to let the shape-shifter crawl over his body, hovering inches above his own, and soon that sweet smile was pushing up against Billy’s.

And in that simple gesture, Billy’s stomach fluttered as though it was their first time, and the remaining tension began to ebb. Arms looped around Teddy’s neck, angling their necks so that their tongues could share a brief meeting. Billy’s fingers wove through the soft, blonde hair, his calves hugging Teddy’s side, thanking him for the earlier treatment.

Teddy replied in kind, tongue more than pleased to do most of the work as it explored familiar territory, the spikes on his fingers spelling words out on Billy’s ribs. One green arm braced itself over the mage’s head, allowing better leverage to ensure the kiss could last as long as the arm could hold out.

Noises buried themselves in Teddy’s mouth each time Billy tried to restrain a giggle or laugh, and ultimately failed. In return, Billy’s hands danced down the powerful length of Teddy’s upper back and squeezed, rubbing circles with the heel of each palm enough to reward himself with a groan from the blonde.

“Feels good?” Billy whispered against his mouth.

“I wouldn’t complain if you did it again,” Teddy said, chuckling through his nose.

“Hey!”

Billy’s mouth went rigid against Teddy, a gasp lodging itself in the kiss as his head spun to confront the source of the disruption.

“That’s my spot!”

Isaac stared, large eyes going wider as he gaped at the deflowering of his favorite spot on the couch, his expression a potent mix of horror and accusation while his hands clutched a social studies packet.

Billy stared back, mind wrestling for explanations and churning up nothing but one-syllable sounds, and soon he snapped his jaw shut and looked up at Teddy, who flashed him a look that was just as amused as it was apologetic.

And soon, Billy felt his lips pulling up, dejectedly aware that this was just another notch in Murphy’s Law, and yet still his smile grew.

What else should have he expected?

It was just one of those days.

**-X-**


End file.
